What difference does a docking station make? Sometimes you want to spend a minute or two setting up your laptop in a more serious way, and that's just as reasonable with or without a docking station.
I've put a disproportionate number of hours and $$$ into my homelab over the years, and I still only have 2.5G Ethernet switches deployed. Most offices' (much less home/coworking space/etc.) network traffic is passing through single-gigabit switches.
That said, I'm kind of sad that Framework and others have generally opted to let "third party USB-C docks" be the docking solution. I miss the days when my Thinkpad dropped onto its docking station with a purpose build bottom connector and seamlessly became a desktop/deskside type computer that was wired into my desk setup. Sadly I think that vision of docking died with the Thinkpad's sale to Lenovo.
Back in the early days of wireless networking I had my laptop configured with the wireless and wired networks bonded. I want to say that was 2Mbps on the wireless, so if I was doing a big transfer I could walk over to a wired port in my house and plug in to get 100Mbps.
Unfortunately, all 3 USB-C dongles I tried had significantly worse performance than the built-in 1 gig ethernet on the dock, apparently using the RTL8156 chipset which is known to be unstable.
I've got a 4th dongle on the way to try next! If I buy enough of these things I'll have spent more than just buying the right dock in the first place.
https://frame.work/pl/en/products/dual-m-2-adapter
People have been making custom OCuLink adapters and recently Framework developed its own:
Try to load any modern website on dial-up. The connection will likely timeout before a full page load.
Once 5g became pervasive and data cheap, no one gaf about a cold load weight fitting on a floppy.
I’m still clutching my iphone mini, which after ios 26 just boggs down under the absurd weight of many pages and turns in to a space heater before reloading entire page b/c of error. No need for forced obsolescence when the enshittification of basic websites takes care of that for you. :-/